I honestly can't remember if this was the case before the current incarnation of TORC, but as I mentioned in the New Board... thread, there is a problem with all the posts on the board that are older than May 2004 (the date of a previous major board move). All the old posts display as raw html. Long posts are particularly hard to read, as paragraph breaks just appear as <BR> tags within a wall of text.

Some of us do still refer to and link to those posts, and it would be a shame if the board's history remained in its current less-than-ideal state. This obviously affects a lot of posts, perhaps about half the total ever posted to TORC.

I don't know if this can be easily fixed? (I guess that phpBB probably doesn't allow html to just be 'turned on' en masse, for sensible security reasons).

[The links to the old set of smilies are also broken, such as http://www.tolkienonline.com/mb/i/expressions/face-icon-small-rolleyes.gif .. but that is probably a less annoying problem.]

I've had a look at "fixing" this from the client side with javascript, i.e. a bookmarklet or greasemonkey script. But I don't really know what I'm doing. The following replacements do not have the desired outcome, e.g. applied to this thread, where the display error appear on the first 14 posts (pre May 2004):

I can't be of any help on this but do want to say I, too, enjoy reading the effected threads / posts and would love to read them easily..without having to sift through the "raw Html". I have not shared "reference links" to many of those threads because they are a bit of a chore to read. Which, as you said, is a shame because there are "many gems" in those threads...

perhaps about half the total ever posted to TORC

.

I really do hope this can be "fixed" for all of us and I thank you for your efforts. They are appreciated.